


Forever, Rose Tyler

by asarahworld



Series: The Doctor and Rose Tyler [31]
Category: Doctor Who, Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: F/M, Ficandchips, Timepetals: Autumn Fic Bingo, Timepetalsprompts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-26
Updated: 2017-11-26
Packaged: 2019-02-06 23:39:38
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12828594
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asarahworld/pseuds/asarahworld
Summary: This was supposed to be a small ficlet.  It’s now almost 2000 words, is most definitely not fluff, and has some angst sprinkled in.  It also fills three bingo squares for mentions of a coffee shop, pie, and cider.





	Forever, Rose Tyler

**Author's Note:**

> This was supposed to be a small ficlet. It’s now almost 2000 words, is most definitely not fluff, and has some angst sprinkled in. It also fills three bingo squares for mentions of a coffee shop, pie, and cider.

His hearts hammer in his chest as he greedily drinks in the sight of her. He’d lost track of how many years it had been since he had last seen her; this regeneration was good at forgetting. He tells himself that he should go back and lock himself in the TARDIS, dematerialise and go somewhere far, far away. She’s more beautiful than he remembers, and it takes everything in him to stay where he is. He closes his eyes, but blocking her from view only heightens the rest of his senses. He is acutely aware of her movement – she’s sitting down – why is she sitting? She should be looking for the TARDIS or resetting her Dimension Cannon or – the Doctor is suddenly aware that he is running. She’s crying. The Doctor never could bear to see Rose Tyler cry.

He sits down on the wet pavement beside her, wanting to take her in his arms, wanting to kiss her tears away, wanting to softly stroke her face, but he resists that urge. She doesn’t know him – she can’t know him, not with this face – and instead offers a small smile, hopeful and yet sad. “Hello,” he says softly. His hands long to caress her face, to comfort her, and so he awkwardly claps them together before changing his mind and balling them up inside his jacket pockets.

Rose swipes at her face, her hands wet but the tearstains are still clearly visible. “M alright. Just havin’ a bad day.” Her voice breaks.

His hands have left his pockets with a handkerchief before he has time to think. Gently, he wipes the water from her face, then presses the handkerchief into her hands.

“Thanks,” she mutters, pulling at it awkwardly. They sit in silence for a moment, Rose side-eyeing him. “You seem remarkably calm, running into a crazy woman crying her eyes out on the pavement.”

“You’re not crazy,” the Doctor exclaims. The very idea of Rose Tyler being insane was so far from reality that he had to smile. “You are brilliant.” Brilliant. He hadn’t said that work since he’d regenerated.

“You’ve only just met me. All you know, I could be- I could,” she breathes in sharply, pressing his handkerchief to her eyes.

He takes her hand in his. “Tell me what’s wrong,” he says softly, his hearts full of love for this woman that he hasn’t seen in years, decades even.

Rose looks at him for a long moment, clearly trying to decide whether to trust him. He thinks of every moment they spent together, subtly projecting his thoughts to her mind.

“I had this friend,” she began. Rose Tyler, you were never just a friend to me. “We met, I don’t know, five years ago now. Anyway, he saved my life. That’s how we met, if you can believe it. So we go off, round the u-, round the world and we got separated. We were able to… to get in touch once, but I’m trying to find him again. And, maybe, he’s looking for me.”

The Doctor swallows, trying to rein in his emotions. Of course he had looked for her. He’d looked across the entire universe just to find one tiny crack. He remembered scouring space through every age, searching for any way to bring her back. He’d found nothing. But Rose had found and created her dimension cannon, and brought herself back to him. Rose. She was shaking.

“Cold?” He asks lightly, desperately trying to keep the more-than-friendly concern from his voice.

“May- maybe a little,” Rose clears her throat, pulling the zipper up all the way on her jacket.

People are passing them on both sides and the Doctor stands, pulling Rose up with him from the pavement. “How about a cuppa? There ought to be someplace around here that makes a somewhat decent cup of tea – this is a human colony world, after all.” He grins, then remembers that Rose doesn’t know who he is. She more than likely would rather be on her way, go back to Pete’s World and prep for another jump. “Unless, of course, you don’t want to! We are perfect strangers after all – ” (what a lie that was) “ – and, and,” he was backing himself into a corner.

He shouldn’t have been surprised when she agreed. Rose had always been adventurous. Rose was adventurous, he reprimanded himself for thinking of her in the past. As he reminded himself every day, she was alive and living her life with her own Doctor and their own TARDIS in their own universe. But that was the past. And it was the future. Right now, Rose was with him.

The little shop that they stop in serves miniature pie slices. There are the standard Earth varieties of pumpkin, apple, and banana cream, as well as pies made from the indigenous berries and fruits. The Doctor automatically takes a slice of banana pie for himself and it isn’t until they’ve been seated that he realizes that Rose is staring at it. He must have reminded her of his previous selves. Bananas really were good.

“Are you alright?” The Doctor asks. Rose doesn’t answer, still staring at his pie. “Rose,” he says, worriedly. She looks back at him, eyes hardening.

“I never told you my name.” Her voice is calm, but he hears the slight edge. The Doctor stares at her helplessly, running his hand across his face. Slowly, he reaches inside his jacket pocket and pulls out his sonic screwdriver, pushing it across the table.

Rose picks it up, keeping her eyes fixed on him nervously.

“Different case,” he says slowly. “Same software, though. Point it at the light and it’ll explode. Point it at a lock, and it’ll open.”

A series of expressions pass over Rose’s face. Recognition, suspicion, curiosity, hope.

“Doctor?”

The Doctor smiles hopefully. “Hello.”

“Doctor.” The way she says his name isn’t a question. She leans toward him, hands out as if to touch his face. He takes her hand in his, pressing it to his cheek, closing his eyes and allowing himself to sigh contentedly. Rose quickly slides out of the booth and sits beside him. “Doctor,” her voice breaks, thick with emotion. “My Doctor.”

His hearts beat faster as she calls him hers. “Yeah?”

“Of course,” Rose looks down at their hands, entwined together. 

“Rose Tyler,” he says and she looks back up at him, her eyes once more filled with tears.

“It’s you,” she says simply. He aches to take her with him into the TARDIS, to selfishly keep her for himself. Even as he thinks about it, he sees timelines snapping and fraying and blinking out of existence. He can’t keep her, not even for a day.

He wants to tell her that he misses her. He wants to tell her that he loves her. But those aren’t his words to say. They don’t even belong to Sandshoes. They’re the other Doctor’s. The one who is the same as him except in one way. He puts him out of his mind.

“I tried so hard to walk by. I knew it would be too tempting to change the timelines if I saw you.”

“Isn’t this dangerous then?” Rose made to stand up, but the Doctor pulled her closer.

“Maybe. But what’s life without a little risk, eh?” He was a reckless man, he knew. He still cared far too much, but was now willing to risk more. What was risk when you had already lost everything? And he had lost, everything and more, time and time again.

“You’re different,” she says, and the tantalizing question is on his lips before he has time to think. Good different or bad different? But he doesn’t ask.

“Not so different,” he says instead.

“No,” Rose agrees. He’s not so different. A bit more enigmatic perhaps, but still the Doctor. Still her Doctor.

“That’s twice now, you know?”

“Sorry?” Rose studies his face, learning every new line, studying each new feature.

“Your Doctor,” he smiles again and he looks so- so Doctor-ish that Rose has to smile back.

“Aren’t you?” She asks hesitantly.

“Forever,” he repeats her promise that she made to him, a life time ago on a planet far, far away. “Of course I am. And I always will be.”

“I don’t find you, do I?” So many times she’s come so close. And now she’s found him but it’s too late.

“Course you do. You’re brilliant, remember?” The Doctor brushes her hair back and Rose leans into his touch. She’s long since dead, then. She bitterly thinks of the irony – she just watched the Doctor – her Doctor – be carried off by UNIT and then she meets the Doctor after he saw her die.

“But you didn’t regenerate! In the street, they took your body away! You were dead!” Rose remembers suddenly, looking at this Doctor with concern.

“It works out, in the end,” he says quietly. “Trust me?”

Rose searches his face, one that she doesn’t know very well, and nods. “Always.”

The desire to tell her that he loves her burns. The words have lodged themselves in the back of his throat and he swallows roughly to no avail. “Rose,” her name escapes. He can’t tell her. I don’t get to say those words to you. They’re not mine to say, not with these lips and not when I have two hearts. Two hearts that have been mended so many times only to break again.

The Dimension Cannon beeps. Finished recharging, then. Rose looks at it as though it’s a foreign object to her. “You need to go,” he touches the cannon briefly, his fingers lingering where they touch her.

“Doctor,” she starts, words not enough for what she needs. She swallows hard. “The last time I saw you, I told you that I loved you.”

“I know,” he says simply. He knows that she loves him, he knows that she told him. He knows that she’s asking him not to let her disappear again, at least not without knowing one way or the other. “Oh, Rose Tyler, of course I love you.” Any semblance of an emotional barrier shatters. “Rose, I have lived so long without you and I shouldn’t have told you because he needed to be the one to tell you but I miss you So. Much. And it is taking every ounce of willpower to keep reminding myself that I need to let you go so that Time doesn’t start breaking down around us. But first, I am going to kiss you, because I waited too long and I will never get this opportunity again.” She would, of course, kiss the other other him at Bad Wolf Bay.

She tastes of fruit and tea and Rose, it’s like the scent that lingers after they used to hug, only better. He kisses her slowly, languidly taking his time. The Dimension Cannon beeps again.

“I love you,” he says, making sure that it did not sound like a goodbye. He did not wait to use them as a farewell. He had waited to make it special, and then he had lost the opportunity. He didn’t care that they weren’t his words to say to her, only that he was the Doctor and he was still utterly in love with Rose Tyler.

“My Doctor,” she says once more.

He smiles, wanting both for her last view of him to be happy and for his last view of her to be clear. “Forever, Rose Tyler.”

She fades as she jumps back to Pete’s World. His hands are left holding air, staring at empty space. He stands there silently, a warm smile on his face, for so long that even his Time senses can’t measure accurately. Only then does he head back for the TARDIS, thinking of his pink and yellow human.


End file.
